Tag Archives: Facebook Instant Articles

When people are dating it is often said that they are looking for “Mr. Right” or “Ms. Right”. That is, finding someone who is just the right romantic match for them.

In the case of today’s rapid development, experimentation and implementation of blockchain technology, if a startup’s new technology takes hold, it might soon find a highly productive (but maybe not so romantic) match in finding Mr. or Ms. [literal] Right by deploying the blockchain as a form of global registry of creative works ownership.

Applications of blockchain technology for the potential management of economic and distribution benefits of “creative professions”, including writers, musicians and others, that have been significantly affected by prolific online file copying still remains relatively unexplored. As a result, they do not yet have the means to “prove and protect ownership” of their work. Moreover, they do have an adequate system to monetize their digital works. But the blockchain, by virtue of its structural and operational nature, can supply these creators with “provenance, identity and micropayments“. (See also the October 27, 2015 Subway Fold post entitled Summary of the Bitcoin Seminar Held at Kaye Scholer in New York on October 15, 2015 for some background on these three elements.)

Now on to the efforts of a startup called Mine ( @mine_labs ), co-founded by Jesse Walden and Denis Nazarov¹. They are preparing to launch a new metadata protocol called Mediachain that enables creators working in digital media to write data describing their work along with a timestamp directly onto the blockchain. (Yet another opportunity to go out on a sort of, well, date.) This system is based upon the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). Mine believes that IPSF is a “more readable format” than others presently available.

Walden thinks that Mediachain’s “decentralized nature”, rather than a more centralized model, is critical to its objectives. Previously, a very “high-profile” somewhat similar initiative to establish a similarly global “database of musical rights and works” called the Global Repertoire Database (GDR) had failed.

(Mine maintains this page of a dozen recent posts on Medium.com about their technology that provides some interesting perspectives and details about the Mediachain project.)

Mediachain’s Objectives

Walden and Nazarov have tried to innovate by means of changing how media businesses interact with the Internet, as opposed to trying to get them to work within its established standards. Thus, the Mediachain project has emerged with its focal point being the inclusion of descriptive data and attribution for image files by combining blockchain technology and machine learning². As well, it can accommodate reverse queries to identify the creators of images.

Nazarov views Mediachain “as a global rights database for images”. When used in conjunction with, among others, Instagram, he and Walden foresee a time when users of this technology can retrieve “historic information” about a file. By doing so, they intend to assist in “preserving identity”, given the present challenges of enforcing creator rights and “monetizing content”. In the future, they hope that Mediachain inspires the development of new platforms for music and movies that would permit ready access to “identifying information for creative works”. According to Walden, their objective is to “unbundle identity and distribution” and provide the means to build new and more modern platforms to distribute creative works.

Potential Applications for Public Institutions

Mine’s co-founders believe that there is further meaningful potential for Mediachain to be used by public organizations who provide “open data sets for images used in galleries, libraries and archives”. For example:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (“The Met” as it is referred to on their website and by all of my fellow New York City residents), has a mandate to license the metadata about the contents of their collections. The museum might have a “metadata platform” of its own to host many such projects.

The New York Public Library has used their own historical images, that are available to the public to, among other things, create maps.³Nazarov and Walden believe they could “bootstrap the effort” by promoting Mediachain’s expanded apps in “consumer-facing projects”.

Maintaining the Platform Security, Integrity and Extensibility

Prior to Mediachain’s pending launch, Walden and Nazarov are highly interested in protecting the platform’s legitimate users from “bad actors” who might wrongfully claim ownership of others’ rightfully owned works. As a result, to ensure the “trust of its users”, their strategy is to engage public institutions as a model upon which to base this. Specifically, Mine’s developers are adding key functionality to Mediachain that enables the annotation of images.

The new platform will also include a “reputation system” so that subsequent users will start to “trust the information on its platform”. In effect, their methodology empowers users “to vouch for a metadata’s correctness”. The co-founders also believe that the “Mediachain community” will increase or decrease trust in the long-term depending on how it operates as an “open access resource”. Nazarov pointed to the success of Wikipedia to characterize this.

Following the launch of Mediachain, the startup’s team believes this technology could be integrated into other existing social media sites such as the blogging platform Tumblr. Here they think it would enable users to search images including those that may have been subsequently altered for various purposes. As a result, Tumblr would then be able to improve its monetization efforts through the application of better web usage analytics.

The same level of potential, by virtue of using Mediachain, may likewise be found waiting on still other established social media platforms. Nazarov and Walden mentioned seeing Apple and Facebook as prospects for exploration. Nazarov said that, for instance, Coindesk.com could set its own terms for its usage and consumption on Facebook Instant Articles (a platform used by publishers to distribute their multimedia content on FB). Thereafter, Mediachain could possibly facilitate the emergence of entirely new innovative media services.

Nazarov and Walden temper their optimism because the underlying IPFS basis is so new and acceptance and adoption of it may take time. As well, they anticipate “subsequent issues” concerning the platform’s durability and the creation of “standards for metadata”. Overall though, they remain sanguine about Mediachain’s prospects and are presently seeking developers to embrace these challenges.

How would applications built upon Mediachain affect or integrate with digital creative works distributed by means of a Creative Commons license?

What new entrepreneurial opportunities for startup services might arise if this technology eventually gains web-wide adoption and trust among creative communities? For example, would lawyers and accountants, among many others, with clients in the arts need to develop and offer new forms of guidance and services to navigate a Mediachain-enabled marketplace?

How and by whom should standards for using Mediachain and other potential development path splits (also known as “forks“), be established and managed with a high level of transparency for all interested parties?

Does analogizing what Bitcoin is to the blockchain also hold equally true for what Mediachain is to the blockchain, or should alternative analogies and perspectives be developed to assist in the explanation, acceptance and usage of this new platform?

1. This link from Mine’s website is to an article entitled Introducing Mediachain by Denis Nazarov, originally published on Medium.com on January 2, 2016. He mentions in his text an earlier startup called Diaspora that ultimately failed in its attempt at creating something akin to the Mediachain project. This December 4, 2014 Subway Fold post entitled Book Review of “More Awesome Than Money” concerned a book that expertly explored the fascinating and ultimately tragic inside story of Diaspora.

2. Many of the more than two dozen Subway Fold posts in the category of Smart Systems cover some of the recent news, trends and applications in machine learning.

First, for some initial perspective, on January 21, 2015, a Subway Fold Post entitled The Transformation of News Distribution by Social Media Platforms in 2015, examined how the nature of news media was being dramatically impacted by social media. This new Pew Research Institute report focuses on the changing demographics of Facebook and Twitter users for news consumption.

This new study found that 63% of both Twitter and Facebook users are now getting their news from these leading social media platforms. As compared to a similar Pew survey in 2013, this is a 52% increase for Twitter and a 47% increase for Facebook. Of those following a live news event as it occurs, the split is more pronounced as 59% of Twitter users and 31% of Facebook users are engaged in viewing such coverage.

According to Amy Mitchell, one of the report’s authors and Pew’s Director of Journalism Research, each social media site “adapt to their role” and provide “unique features”. As well, they ways in which US users connect in different ways “have implications” for how they “learn about their world” and partake in their democracy.

In order enhance their growing commitment to live coverage, both sites have recently rolled out innovative new services. Twitter has a full-featured multimedia app called Project Lightening to facilitate following news in real-time. Facebook is likewise expanding its news operations with their recent announced of the launch of Instant Articles, a rapid news co-publishing app in cooperation with nine of the world’s leading news organizations.

Further parsing the survey’s demographic data for US adults generated the following findings:

Sources of News: 10% get their news on Twitter while 41% get their news on Facebook, with an overlap of 8% using both. This is also due to the fact that Facebook has a much larger user base than Twitter. Furthermore, while the total US user bases of both platforms currently remains steady, the percentages of those users therein seeking news on both is itself increasing.

Comparative Trends in Five Key Demographics: The very enlightening chart at the bottom of Page 2 of the report breaks down Twitter’s and Facebook’s percentages and percentage increases between 2013 and 2015 for gender, race, age, education level, and incomes.

Relative Importance of Platforms: These results are further qualified in that those surveyed reported that Americans still see both of these platforms overall as “secondary news sources” and “not a very important way” to stay current.

Age Groups: When age levels were added, this changes to nearly 50% of those between 18 and 35 years finding Twitter and Facebook to be “the most important” sources of news. Moving on to those over 35 years, the numbers declined to 34% of Facebook users and 31% of Twitter users responding that these platforms were among the “most important” news sources.

Content Types Sought and Engaged: Facebook users were more likely to click on political content than Twitter users to the extent of 32% to 25%, respectively. The revealing charts in the middle of Page 3 demonstrate that Twitter users see and pursue a wider variety of 11 key news topics. As well, the percentage tallies of gender differences by topic and by platform are also presented.

My own questions are as follows:

Might Twitter and Facebook benefit from additional cooperative ventures to further expand their comprehensiveness, target demographics, and enhanced data analytics for news categories by exploring additional projects with other organizations. For instance, and among many other possibilities, there are Dataminr who track and parse the entirety of the Twitterverse in real-time (as previously covered in these three Subway Fold posts); Quid who is tracking massive amount of online news (as previously covered in this Subway Fold post); and GDELT which is translating online news in real-time in 65 languages (as previously covered in this Subway Fold post).

What additional demographic categories would be helpful in future studies by Pew and other researchers as this market and its supporting technologies, particularly in an increasingly social and mobile web world, continue to evolve so quickly? For example, how might different online access speeds affect the distribution and audience segmentation of news distributed on social platforms?

Are these news consumption demographics limited only to Twitter and Facebook? For example, LinkedIn has gone to great lengths in the past few years to upgrade its content offerings. How might the results have differed if the Pew questionnaire had included LinkedIn and possibly others like Instagram?

How can this Pew study be used to improve the effectiveness of marketing and business development for news organizations for their sponsors, content strategist for their clients, and internal and external SEO professionals for their organizations?